QuoteProject
People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.
Edgar Degas
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Degas emphasizes that his focus in art is on capturing movement and aesthetics rather than the subjects themselves.

In this quote, Edgar Degas reflects on the perception that he is solely a painter of dancers, revealing a deeper motivation behind his work. He highlights that his true interest lies not just in depicting the dancers themselves, but in the dynamic quality of movement and the beauty of their costumes, suggesting that art is a means to explore broader themes beyond superficial interpretations.

Themes

ArtMovementPaintingDancersAesthetics

In practice

Example use cases

This quote could be used in a discussion about the interpretations of artistic works in a gallery.

More from Edgar Degas

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.
Edgar DegasRead
No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
Edgar DegasRead
Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
Edgar DegasRead
It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.
Edgar DegasRead
The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.
Edgar DegasRead
You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working.
Edgar DegasRead

Similar quotes

We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
Mark RothkoRead
I like to look at pictures, all kinds. And all those things you absorb come out subconsciously one way or another. You'll be taking photographs and suddenly know that you have resources from having looked at a lot of them before. There is no way you can avoid this. But this kind of subconscious influence is good, and it certainly can work for one. In fact, the more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.
Robert MapplethorpeRead
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Aldous HuxleyRead
There is no truer truth obtainable by Man than comes of music
Robert BrowningRead
Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.
Leonard BernsteinRead
I have an impulse to write all over the orange walls- I need an alphabet of endings ripped out of books, of hands pulled off of clocks, of cold stones, of shoes filled with nothing but wind.
Jandy NelsonRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.